Rutgers Changes Course, Fires Rice

Because there’s video, and because the video depicts what it depicts, the story of Mike Rice’s loud, abusive, mostly unhappy and recently ended tenure as men’s basketball coach at Rutgers was never going to be a one-day story. That Rutgers unquestionably did the right thing on Wednesday morning in firing Rice did little to remove the sting and stink of what the video showed—Rice bullying his players in a way that looked to land somewhere north of tough coaching and somewhere south of felony assault. Given Rice’s performance as measured in terms of wins and losses over his three years at Rutgers, it seems likely that he was headed for the exit one way or another. But the shape and sound of all this ensured that this remains a subject of interest, even as Rice—and Rutgers basketball—are consigned once again to obscurity.

“If a Rutgers professor had done what Rice did, he would have been fired immediately,” Sports Illustrated’s George Dohrmann writes. “If [President Robert] Barchi and [AD Tim] Pernetti had viewed what Rice did outside the prism of big-time athletics, if their concern was really for those students, they would have watched Rice treat those athletes worse than most people treat their dogs and canned him. Instead, they were too worried about themselves and the Rutgers brand.”

For all the abstracted debates about what Rice’s behavior reflects about the culture of college sports or the bizarre and mini-culture Rice created, Rutgers’ concern at the moment is plain—how to regain the trust that has been so thoroughly lost since everyone first saw those videos. “[Rice] wasn’t a petulant Hollywood director or a reckless contestant on reality TV,” the Journal’s Jason Gay writes. “He was at a university, where the primary goal—despite all the warped priorities and millions in college sports—is supposedly to teach and prepare a next generation. Rutgers has a choice: What kind of school does it want to be? What does it stand for? Right now it looks like another school that got swept up by sports, and learned a lesson the hard way.”

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As a general rule, it’s not really fair to call a teenager, even one as talented as Canadian hoops prodigy Andrew Wiggins, The Next LeBron James. There are a variety of obvious reasons for this, starting with the fact that LeBron James is not anywhere near done being This Particular LeBron James. But Wiggins, the top recruit in a stacked class of rising collegiate one-and-dones—he’s presently uncommitted, although any college hoops fan could make some solid guesses as to where he’ll end up next year—is unique, and not just because he looks like one of the most talented wing players to do the requisite NCAA layover in some years.

“Spend some time talking to Andrew Wiggins and you quickly realize he’s far from LeBron James,” SB Nation’s Ricky O’Donnell writes. “Wiggins doesn’t seem impressed by anything he’s capable of doing and doesn’t appear to grasp why everyone makes such a big fuss about it. Wiggins does not want to be a rock star. He seems like the type of person who just wants to be left alone to hang out with his friends and play video games. Which is to say, Andrew Wiggins seems very much like an 18-year old.”

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